Here is the answer for anyone who comes across a foreign-language quotation in a newspaper article or a book and isn't quite sure what it means. Here are famous sayings, in five European languages--Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish--accompanied by their translations into English and cross-indexed for easy reference. Just what did Mussolini say about making the trains run on time? Did Marie-Antoinette really tell the poor to eat cake? Concise Dictionary of Foreign Quotations includes more than 3,000 entries, chosen by five editors, each one widely read in the language concerned. The majority of entries were included because they are familiar, those an English reader would be most likely to encounter. Literary quotations, political quotations, poetic thoughts, pungent comments, polished epigrams, shrewd perceptions--by everyone from Cicero to Sartre, from Michelangelo to Picasso.

This dictionary results from the titanic work by Rev. James Wood who collected quotations from ancient and modern English and foreign sources and put them in alphabetic order. The dictionary contains phrases, mottoes, maxims, proverbs, definitions, aphorisms, and sayings of different prominent people.